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- Title
Grammaticalisation due to homonymy avoidance In Gudbrandsdalen /æpr˛ede/?
- Authors
Enger, Hans-Olav
- Abstract
This paper is devoted to the historical origin of the definiteness suffix - de on a class of neuter nouns in the Northern Gudbrandsdalen dialect of Norwegian. Homonymy avoidance, which has previously been invoked, is argued to be irrelevant. Rather, the suffix has arisen through reanalysis in combination with analogy; it appears to be an example of what Haspelmath (1995) has termed ‘secretion’. The case is theoretically interesting, both because it indicates that analogy can work from the minority on the majority and because it shows that analogy in one place in a system can lead to complications elsewhere.
- Subjects
GUDBRANDSDALEN (Norway); GRAMMATICALIZATION; HOMONYMS; AVOIDANCE (Psychology); ANALOGY
- Publication
Transactions of the Philological Society, 2007, Vol 105, Issue 1, p42
- ISSN
0079-1636
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1111/j.1467-968X.2007.00183.x